Donald Trump and Barack Obama Lost a Lot of Followers in Twitter's Purge

Twitter has been trying to clean house over the past several months — and this week President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama saw a dramatic drop in followers.

On Wednesday, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s legal, policy and trust & safety lead, announced in a blog post that the company would remove locked accounts from follower lists.

“Over the years, we’ve locked accounts when we detected sudden changes in account behavior,” Gadde wrote. “In these situations, we reach out to the owners of the accounts and unless they validate the account and reset their passwords, we keep them locked with no ability to log in. This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down.”

Locked accounts differ from bots or spam, because they were started by real people — it’s just unclear if those people still have control over the account, due to changes in the account’s behavior.

The New York Timesreported that among those who lost followers were the current and former commanders in chief. President Trump lost roughly 340,000 followers, and former President Obama lost around 3 million followers.

Twitter has confirmed that between May and June the social media platform suspended around 70 million accounts (which led to a dip in the company’s share prices). Twitter has come under fire recently over Russia-linked automated accounts (bots) and their influence on the 2016 election. Earlier this year, Twitter said it found and removed roughly 50,000 Russia-linked accounts, according to reports in January, and information was turned over to congressional investigators.

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